Matt Ellsworth – SEO Consultant & Internet Marketer

I’ve been helping a friend try to recover a stolen domain name (was at GoDaddy) for the last week. Someone logged into the account, changed the email, and all the information on the account to something in India.

Then they transferred the domain name out of the account to a protected name service at name.com

That was over 3 months ago. GoDaddy never emailed to say "are you sure you want to change all your account info, or email address, or transfer this domain". Instead he was left blind sided by all this. Until the hacker changed his password – then he realized that something was up.

When he did discover that all this had happened – and contacted GoDaddy – they said that there was nothing they could do.

I’m pretty stumped as to how all this happened without GoDaddy so much as notifying the customer that their account information had been stolen. But this certainly doesn’t make me think too highly of GoDaddy.

I am still hopeful that they will be able to recover the domain name.

He spoke with someone who looked into it all and found out that the registrant info was never changed before they transferred the domain. This was likely because of the icann rules that say that you can’t transfer a domain name within 60 days of changing the registrant info.